Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima a Japanese novelist, playwright and essayist (1925-1970) regarded as one of the most important and controversial writers of twentieth-century Japan. His disciplined prose, romantic obsession with beauty and death, and theatrical public life culminated in his ritual suicide after a failed attempt to rally the Self-Defence Forces.

Early Life and Youth

Yukio Mishima was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, born in Tokyo in 1925 into a middle-class family of civil servants. He was raised largely by his grandmother, a domineering woman of aristocratic descent who kept him in a darkened room, separated him from his mother and forbade exercise and boyish play, an upbringing that left lasting marks on his imagination. At school he was a brilliant and precocious student, admired for his writing and drawn to the intensity of Japanese classical literature, and he began composing stories as a child.

In 1941 he published his first prose under the pen name Yukio Mishima, a name chosen to keep his literary life hidden from his father, who wished him to pursue a conventional career. He read widely in Japanese and European literature and was powerfully affected by the German romantics and by the aestheticism of the fin de siecle. During the war he received a draft notice, but he was declared unfit for service after a mistaken diagnosis, a reprieve that he later felt as a burden of shame for having survived while others died.

Literary Stardom

Mishima's first novel, Thieves, appeared in 1948, but it was Confessions of a Mask, published in 1949, that made his reputation. A thinly disguised autobiographical account of a boy discovering his attraction to men and his fascination with violence, it was daring for its time and established him as the voice of a new generation. Through the 1950s he produced an astonishing stream of fiction, short stories, plays and essays, and The Sound of Waves, a serene love story set on a fishing island, won a major prize and became a bestseller.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, based on the burning of a famous temple by a young monk, explored the destructive power of beauty with unmatched intensity. He was also a formidable writer for the Kabuki and Noh theatres and for modern drama, and several of his plays became staples of the Japanese stage. Books such as Forbidden Colors and After the Banquet showed his range, and by the 1960s he was the most celebrated, and most photographed, literary figure in Japan, a public personality as much as a private artist.

The Sea of Fertility

Mishima's masterpiece and final work is the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, comprising Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel. Begun in the 1960s and completed on the morning of his death, it spans the twentieth century and follows a young aristocrat named Shigekuni Honda as he witnesses the reincarnation of a friend across decades and continents. Each volume places a young man of exceptional beauty and purity at the centre of events, and each dies in circumstances that seem to confirm a pattern of rebirth.

Honda, the rational observer, is drawn into a metaphysics in which the soul returns and the wheel of being turns, and the last volume closes on a note of radical emptiness and dissolution. The tetralogy fuses Buddhist and Hindu ideas of transmigration with a sweeping vision of modern Japanese history, from the decay of the Meiji aristocracy to the student radicalism of the 1960s. It is at once a philosophical inquiry, a set of historical novels and a long meditation on beauty, time and the impossibility of escaping either.

Aesthetics, Nationalism and the Body

Mishima's thought turned on beauty, heroism and death, and he rejected what he saw as the softness and materialism of postwar Japan. He was drawn to the samurai tradition and to the ideal of a noble death, and his writing repeatedly stages the body as the site where beauty and violence meet. Discipline of the body became, for him, a moral and almost religious programme, and he took up bodybuilding in his thirties, transforming his frail physique into a muscular and renowned one and posing for photographs as works of art.

In 1968 he founded the Shield Society, a private militia of young men dedicated to military training and to the defence of the emperor, a project that furthered his political and aesthetic convictions alike. His essays defended the imperial institution and criticised the postwar constitution, while his fiction exposed the destructive consequences of pursuing perfection. This divided legacy, a supreme artist and a political militant fused in one person, remains central to any understanding of him and has made his work the subject of continuing debate.

Death and Legacy

On 25 November 1970, Mishima and several members of the Shield Society entered a Self-Defence Forces base in Tokyo, seized the commandant's office and stepped onto a balcony to address the soldiers below. His speech, urging them to restore the emperor to power, was met with jeers, and he then returned inside and performed seppuku, the ritual suicide he had long contemplated. The act, planned with literary precision, turned his life and work into a single statement and shocked the world.

Whether it should be read as the culmination of his aesthetics or as the tragedy of a man consumed by his own myth is debated to this day, but few deny its terrible consistency with the themes he had explored for twenty years. Mishima left behind a body of writing of extraordinary range: more than forty novels and volumes of stories, dozens of plays, and essays on politics, aesthetics and the body. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize and remains the most translated and most studied modern Japanese author after Kawabata and Soseki.

See also

• Confessions of a Mask
• The Sea of Fertility
• The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
• Seppuku